


Compartments

by Ordhjoma



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Internal Monologue, Minor Character Death, ew dead bodies ew ew ew, mentions of hanging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25820524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ordhjoma/pseuds/Ordhjoma
Summary: Breathe Iðunn. In and Out. Slowly. Deeply. Take it one step at a time. You always work best in such a manner.A lot happens at the beginning of Pillars Of Eternity! Buncha people die, there's like a bear, and some bandits, and you might be losing your mind. It's a lot to process!A fic detailing how Watcher Iðunn dealt with it.(Spoiler: Not Great)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Compartments

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to my friends for dealing with my bullshit.  
> I wrote this in the dead of the night, because sometimes you just get struck with the writer disease where you feel the need to delete old fics and replace them with better, longer ones.  
> Enjoy?

_Breathe Iðunn. In and Out. Slowly. Deeply. Take it one step at a time. You always work best in such a manner._

1\. Take what remains of Heodan and Calisca, bodies mangled and twisted in death and begin to prepare. Close their eyes. Remove their belongings, take the little water you have and use some of their clothes as a cloth, wash them. Dress them once more. Begin to dig in the soil of a holy place you know not the importance of.  
1.1. These are not your people, they are not Glanfathan either. They do not belong here. **You** do not belong here. Best be quick.  
1.2. Will the Gods understand your motivations? We do not pick where we die, nor where we get buried. You simply have to hope that good intentions are enough.

2\. Place the bodies into the ground. Go back to the cave in, grab big stones. You were always more fast than strong, but do your best to drag stones back outside. Cover makeshift graves, with the large stones to protect from the wildlife. The stones are now stained with your blood from the effort, but that is not the important part. Place their things on the stones, add some flowers too. You do not know their names, or even if they are good offerings, but they seem nice enough.  
2.1. Know that if you were to be reasonable, you should grab Calisca’s torch. It is very dark, and you have quite a ways to go.  
2.2. You do not. There are woods around here, you will make another. You have seen how it is done many times by now. You will figure it out, or wait till daybreak. Whichever comes first. Calisca will use the torch to light the Beyond.  
2.3. Maybe. You are no priest, and you know not of the Pallid Knight’s domain. You do not want to know.

3\. Pray. It is not to Rymrgand, which feels a little odd, your tongue knots itself in its unfamiliarity with the words. You pray to Berath, it is clumsy and you struggle to remember all the words to prayer you have heard for the dead before this moment in the Eastern Reach. You remember discussion about endings and how those are more feared than anything here. Cycles. Repetition. This is the way people wish to go. Reincarnation scares _you_ , not them. And you have not died today, not yet; so you will follow their wishes, not yours.  
3.1. These are not your people, these are not your lands.  
3.2. You try your best anyway. It is all you can do.

4\. Patch yourself up. Take spare cloth and wrap your hands, cut from the stones of these ruins. Take a breath. Do not mind these shadows out the corner of your eye. Lay down, it is good to rest for a moment, assess the entirety of your damage.  
4.1. Under no circumstance should you fall asleep during the process. Start with wiggling your toes. Do they hurt? No? Good. Proceed to the ankles. Roll them. Do they hurt? No. Your knees, can you bend them with ease? No, that still hurts. Remember that.  
4.2. Ignore the whispers just from behind your head. They’re not even in any language you know anyway. Wiggle your fingers. Roll your wrists. Bend your arms.  
4.3. There is absolutely no one else alive here. They would breathe and there is no steady breath aside from yours. Take another set of deep breaths. Roll your shoulders. Begin to press and check your organs. Any internal damage? Nothing serious that you can really tell, but you are absolutely bruised, you hit the stone hard. Your head feels like it… _should_ be bleeding but… best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.  
4.4. Do not pay mind to your hallucinations. You have done this before. They’ll go away eventually. You are merely exhausted that is all. Exhausted and horrified. It is perfectly understandable. Do not think about it longer than you need to.

5\. Travel. There is nothing more for you here. You have dealt with the bodies as best you could, you have rested even if for but a moment. You _must_ get to Gilded Vale, if not for a doctor than to at least tell Calisca’s sister the news of her passing. You do not know her name but you will cross that floe when you get to it.  
5.1. This would be a little easier if you knew how to read. The trees are tall and lush, and the night is dark enough without the canopy. Streams of moonlight filter through, showing you a path. You may be going the wrong way entirely, but this is as good a start as any.  
5.2. You follow the path. You are so, so hungry, and your senses are hardly to be trusted at all anymore. You still twitch every time you see a shadow or hear a laugh just _there_. So when you smelled stew you thought that too was false. But with the rising voices, and the sound of a fire, you followed. Because that is too… _real_ to be a hallucination, too many layers to be a trick. Bandits find their end to be a swift one. The cook Tenfrith thanks you and says he’ll meet you in town at a Black Hound Inn for a proper thanks. You forgot to ask where that was, too distracted with eating their stew. You will follow the tracks later.  
5.3. A man named Nonton warns you about a bear, but helpfully points you in the way of Gilded Vale. You tell him you are sorry about his friend. You are unsure what else happened in that conversation, you know you said _something,_ surely you must have. Everything feels like a blur.  
5.4. You kill some Xaurip. You find some more bodies. You bury them. You kill the bear. You promise vengeance to a hallucination, you think it’s a hallucination. It must be a hallucination. You walk back. You kill a wolf. You climb up a ruined wall. You find another dead man. There are so many dead people. You bring him down as carefully as possible. You bury him. You don’t know how much time has passed. You think you are crying. Nothing feels _real_.

6\. You should have gone back and buried those in the caravan. Day is beginning to break. You are so tired. You should really clean up, covered in blood and dirt. You do no such thing, you cannot move, you feel as though you cannot breathe. There is weight on your chest and it is like you are a corpse yourself, under dirt and stone. You should have gone back. You should have stayed. You should have never left home. There is no love here in the Eastern Reach, only Aedyran and corpses.  
6.1. Aedyran signs can go fokk themselves. Can just anyone read here in the Eastern Reach? Aedyran… language of bastards who learn no language other than their own. It’s _always_ Aedyran. This language and no other. No matter where you go, no matter who you are it is always Aedyran that you speak, this language and no other.  
6.2. Jóannis was the one who learned languages outside Ordhjóma, he is the one who travels, not you. If he were here he would know what these damned signs say. Or... well no. If he were here he would have died like everyone else. Ejling does not deserve two dead siblings. It is better this way, you know better.  
6.3. Spitefully avoiding learning languages holds no place here, and hindsight solves nothing.  
6.4. Focus Iðunn. You did not get visions disrupting your life for a whole damned season about Gilded Vale, blackened and disgusting fields of a crop you do not recognize, children whose breaths were shallow and companions you have yet to meet only to stop here in these woods, crying about your brothers. Crying about what could have been.  
6.5. **Get. Up.**

7\. Town. Gilded Vale. The sun is high in the sky, the heat making you feel as though you are melting and there… in the center of town is… is a… _the smell alone-_  
7.1. The towns of The Land are flawed for a good many reasons, food deserts, the elimination of your peoples culture, the sheer unsustainability of it all, just all of it but for all that the colonizers got wrong it was never…  
7.2. If there were trees in the towns of The Land would this be the result?  
7.3. Is this normal? That can’t be true, you’ve stopped in other towns and this was not there. So it is just here? Why would the Gods send you here if this is…? Is this how you will go? Not by cultists in sacred ruins or by storms that rip apart souls but this…?  
7.4. This is no way to treat people, surely this is not right?  
7.5. It too is a hallucination. It has to be. You have not been able to trust your senses for Gods know how long, this must be a part of it. Surely, surely no kith would do this to their own. There must be a limit to cruelty. This cannot possibly-  
7.6. Someone is speaking to you. “Any-mahn-sers.” “Hollow born.” “The Legacy.” You are only half listening. They really did hang all of those people. All of those people just hanging on the tree. You look around. No one is even paying any mind to it, no one that you can see even looks towards it. How do you ignore that? You know that logically, the minds of kith can get used to anything so long as they are exposed to it enough. You shoot a man every day for 5 years and he will come to expect the pain upon every encounter. You know this. This is just… On the one hand you pass spectacularly to be asked if you have ever conceived a child. On the other…

8\. What the _fokk_ have you just walked into Iðunn. What task have the gods given you? How can you possibly do anything here?


End file.
